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A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of the Year * One of KCRW's Best Reads of the Year * A Next Big Idea Club Top 21 Psychology Book of the Year * One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year A pioneer of cultural psychology argues that emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together.
One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some higher potential called the "mind" and, more particularly, the intertwining of body and mind, which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in length. However, the interaction between culture, body and language has not received the due attention that it deserves. Naturally, any serious exploration of the interface between body, language and culture would require an analytical tool that would capture the ways in which different cultural groups conceptualize their feelings, thinking, and other experiences in relation to body and language. A well-established notion that appears to be promising in this direction is that of cultural models, constituting the building blocks of a group's cultural cognition. The volume results from an attempt to bring together a group of scholars from various language backgrounds to make a collective attempt to explore the relationship between body, language and culture by focusing on conceptualizations of the heart and other internal body organs across a number of languages. The general aim of this venture is to explore (a) the ways in which internal body organs have been employed in different languages to conceptualize human experiences such as emotions and/or workings of the mind, and (b) the cultural models that appear to account for the observed similarities as well as differences of the various conceptualizations of internal body organs. The volume as a whole engages not only with linguistic analyses of terms that refer to internal body organs across different languages but also with the origin of the cultural models that are associated with internal body organs in different cultural systems, such as ethnomedical and religious traditions. Some contributions also discuss their findings in relations to some philosophical doctrines that have addressed the relationship between mind, body, and language, such as that of Descartes.
This book presents cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigations of word meaning from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The words they consider are complex, culturally important, and basic, in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay.
This book develops the dual themes that languages can differ widely in their vocabularies, and are also sensitive indices to the cultures to which they belong. Wierzbicka seeks to demonstrate that every language has "key concepts," expressed in "key words," which reflect the core values of a given culture. She shows that cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key concepts, and that the analytical framework necessary for this purpose is provided by the "natural semantic metalanguage," based on lexical universals, that the author and colleagues have developed on the basis of wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations. Appealing to anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers as well as linguists, this book demonstrates that cultural patterns can be studied in a verifiable, rigorous, and non-speculative way, on the basis of empirical evidence and in a coherent theoretical framework.
Alarge-scale investigation on how multilinguals feel about their languages and use them to communicate emotion. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the author looks at the factors that affect multilinguals' self-perceived competence, attitudes, communicative anxiety, language choice and code-switching.
Although Australia prides itself on being multicultural, many Australians have little awareness of what it means to live in two cultures at once, and of how much there is to learn about other cultural perspectives.
Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.
When using emotion terms such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and contempt, it is assumed that the terms used in the native language of the researchers, and translated into English, are completely equivalent in meaning. This is often not the case. This book presents an extensive cross-cultural/linguistic review of the meaning of emotion words
